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siDDis writes "Earlier this year Slashdot mentioned that Norway was moving towards mandatory use of ODF and PDF. Now it's official: the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009. There are three formats that have been mandated for all documentation between authorities, users and partners. HTML for all public information on the Web, PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved and ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit. Documents may also be published in other formats, but they must always be available in either ODF or PDF."

When you really think about it, how stupid would it be if a large government agency even in the US sent out a "document meant for editing" in a microsoft office format. I mean seriously. If the IRS sent me a tax form as a.doc file I would call them up and tell em what I thought of that but probably wouldn't get through cuz it'd already be flooded with pissed off people. I mean, that's like requiring all US citizens to own a copy of Office. Same with Norway. Any country that doesn't choose a non-propietary format is crazy.

That would be like the Australian Tax Office requiring IE for some business reporting. The standard response is that you can do it or be fined. At least they've fixed the need for specific versions of the JVM.

This was a few years back, but maybe they've changed. Then again, it's the tax office.

There's always the X11 version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac. To the Mac purists that is clearly suboptimal, but it works better than trying to use the current version of MS Office for the Mac with Microsoft's new MS Office formats. Of course, an updated version of MS Office for the Mac should be out soon, but then again the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org should be out eventually as well.

The fact of the matter is that if you are using Macs you will likely have compatibility issues every once in a while.

I use NeoOffice [neooffice.org], a native Mac port of Open Office. No X11 needed.

The fact of the matter is that if you are using Macs you will likely have compatibility issues every once in a while.

In the 5 months of using my MacBook Pro I have not had a problem with NeoOffice. While I haven't created or edited any docs with it yet, NeoOffice has opened Office 2007.doc and.docx files I've downloaded from the net without a problem.

put Windows in a feak'n sandbox/VM where it really belongs and run any 'special needs' applications there instead of giving some Microsoft OEM the profits of tying Windows to the hardware. And anybody who purchases a whole computer to run Windows is of of his/her mind and wasting the companies money. IMO.

Yes, but to run Windows in a VM you need a copy of Windows. If you buy a machine on which to run Windows, Microsoft only gets the relatively small amount they charge the OEMs. If you buy a copy of Windows retail to run in your VM, Microsoft makes more. So if your goal is to minimize the amount you give to Microsoft, buying a separate Windows machine is actually the better choice, isn't it?

But that STILL means that the Australian government is mandating that all businesses MUST purchase a Microsoft product under the threat of being fined if they don't.

I suspect you can submit on paper if you want to, lots of small businesses don't have any PCs. But there are probably incentives for online submissions; later deadlines, etc. However small businesses usually pay an accountant to submit for them, and they will certainly have PCs. My brother is a sole-proprieter tradesman in Australia, he has a

That's right, Microsoft does not want people running Windows inside of a VM on Linux and so they put it in their EULA(legal?) that you can't run Windows Vista in a VM. Well, except if you purchase the much much more expensive "business" or "ultimate" versions of Vista.

But why would you want MS Vista? WinXP is far far more compatible with any exiting Windows based application one would be REQUIRED to run in their business/government.

When that something is 'Submit this data or face large fines, You can only use the listed versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer to do this." they will deal with it by buying a machine with Windows installed. I can't remember what the issue was, but it was IE only, including the use of ActiveX controls.

That was true a few years ago but now there are so many open formats out there it really shouldn't matter anymore what platform you use. The only thing that keeps people on Windows is Office. Luckily that is changing fast now.

I have to work with this website [nanoned.nl] on a regular basis. They have a database, made with some weird MS database program, where you can theoretically upload manuscripts. It's so bad it even doesn't work well in IE, and the webmaster tells you to download an ActiveX add-on for Firefox to be able to use the website! I'm a member of many forums and I never had problems uploading stuff to any of them. I've never come across anything as crappy as the NanoNed website. Utterly unbelievable.

Ah but the Mac and Windows versions of IE weren't exactly compatible. A person going to the same website in both Mac and Windows versions of IE would not see the same thing. Then again this could be true of an browser that is cross platform.

But do they have senses of humor and are they able to understand when their culture isn't actually the point of the post, but instead just a detail in a parody of a very common practice on slashdot.
I think so. Gotta a friend from Stavanger. He's an ok guy and pretty sharp, apparently sharper and a little more lighthearted than/. mods.

Spot on about speaking better english than Americans though. My first reply is proof positive.

Scandinavians are so selfsure about the quality of their english that they'll insist that your rightings aren't valid, as you merely speak american. I've been living in Sweden in some years and feel again the most common swinglishsigns. I job now as an oversitter from swedish to english, in addition to controlling english texts, and it has been a good affair.

I honestly don't know the technical ends and outs of either format (I'm a physicist, not a CS... albeit one who had to fuss at his students this semester for turning in crap in.docx format after I told them plaintext), but why the choice of pdf over postscript for the "formatting preserved" format? My department seems to use them pretty interchangeably... and aren't there tons of tools that do nifty things to postscript? (ps2* and *2ps style things?)

My vote would be 'no' on postscript. The tools aren't as commonly installed (or as refined) as PDF. Worse, I believe.ps files commonly do not include the fonts they rely on, leading to lots of headaches. For that and whatever other reasons,.ps is a cavalcade of "execution stack" error messages, while pdf always works.

1. PDFs are much, much smaller - as AC sibling said, about the size of PS after compression2. PDFs are relatively tamper-resistant3. PDFs are more widely understood4. PDFs are lighter to render

I could go on about how they handle images and whatnot better too, but PS is a wonderful format when you still need to work with the document - I'm being completely serious here - but PDF is better as the final distribution method.

Are they really lighter to render? My experience has been that acroread, xpdf, and such tend to bog down. Granted, this evince thingie that came installed with Ubuntu (which I just switched to, from Gentoo) seems pretty nice. (I'm a convert to "It just works!"-style Linux.)

You've gotten your stereotypes wrong. For future reference, Apple geeks are the beret and turtleneck wearing, pretentious snobs, and it's actually the Linux geeks that are the ones that live in mum's basement and have poor personal hygiene.

"Lighter to render" is hard to calculate, and also pretty much irrelevent. PS files will often contain much more character info than is (IMHO -- YMMV) 100% needed while a PDF file will contain strings of characters which can take less time to send to your printer and less space in printer buffer. Also PDF files are computationally simpler to scale down for a small screen (perhaps not in principle but certainly in practice).More importantly: PDF files are more likely to contain words and e searchable, whil

"Lighter to render" is actually a perfectly reasonable blanket statement to make in this case (though I'm sure someone can come up with some corner cases). PostScript is a full-fledged imperative style Turing-strong programming language, whereas PDF is a simplified version of PS, which removes all conditionals and loops, thus being just a nice list of statements.

1. PDFs are much, much smaller - as AC sibling said, about the size of PS after compression

No they are bigger then compressed PS. How much bigger depends on what compression in use and what program used to generate the PostScript file. Note: Complex documents is usally smaller in uncompressed PS, if you use the right tool to generate the PS-file.

Yes. For pages of pure bitonal content, the JBIG2 image compression scheme can produce files approximately 30-40x smaller than the equivalent using CCITT G4. This is such a massive improvement that it makes it tempting to simply represent all documents in raster form with ancillary text information -- in other words, it competes with vector graphics as far as side. No other widely supported potential archival format provides JBIG2. This in itself is an enormous benefit, but not quite a deal-maker for PDF.

PDF really shines in that it is easy to parse and has a limited, well-defined graphics language. The PDF/A standard even further restricts the classes of operations a conformant file can perform. On top of other things, it spells out the requirements for fonts, to ensure that documents rendered in the future will appear as intended. It also dictates that details of the document's semantic structure be embedded to assist analysis of the archived data in the future.

I probably sound like a shill for PDF, but that isn't the case. I simply write commercial code which deals with PDF. It is a terrible shame that Adobe's viewer products have made such a bad impression on everyone. I believe PDF is a well-designed, simple, extensible format with a hell of a lot going for it, if you simply discount everything with the word "Adobe" in it.

I'll second that. JBIG2 is pretty amazing. Apparently, it scans your entire document looking for repeated graphical sections, and then builds up a dictionary of them. It's basically making a bitmap font in reverse. Group 4 was designed for fax machines with anemic CPUs and memory, so an algorithm that uses all the capacity of a modern computer really makes a difference.

If you allow lossy compression, then all the slight variations of a letterform in your document are likely close enough that they can all

I am associated with one of the groups providing input on these decisions, the University of Agder. I think the actual recommendation attaches some technical notes to the suggestion to use PDF, such that the PDF does not employ encryption and is a particular subset of PDF without proprietary features. Also I think there may be recommendations regarding handicap accessibility - some PDF is a blind man's misery because it doesn't preserve the document structure.

All of that said, proper PDF is PostScript. You can feed it to the PostScript interpreter and it will render. It's not full PostScript, but a subset that is easier to process and isn't a full interpretive language as PostScript is. I've wrtten programs in PostScript that have nothing to do with printing, it's a bit similar to Forth.

I've also written my share of PostScript code and agree to most of the things you said. Except one - PDF isn't PostScript. PostScript doesn't support alpha channel but PDF does, which is a major difference. If you render e.g. translucent gradients having a nonlinear shape into a PDF file, there is no way to convert the resulting vector graphics into PostScript (other than bitmap, that is).

I'd better qualify that. Many Adobe Postscript rendering engines will render PDF directly. There are lots of printers that do, many of them do not, however, advertise the feature. GhostScript seems to try but not do as well. The actual image stream is a tokenized logical subset of PostScript, the image model is the same and there is a 1:1 mapping of operators. There's extra stuff in the file that isn't part of the image stream.

It's been 15 years since I've picked up the black-and-white book which defines PDF.

Gah, way to want to reset the clock by 10-12 years. PDF was developed because shuffling PostScript files around was tedious and error prone. The files are large, they don't contain fonts, and since they are plaintext the cr/cr-lf/lf line end issue can affect the file on different OS's, etc... The publishing industry labored under PostScript for far too long. The first P in PDF stands for Portable for a reason. It's a far more portable format than *.ps.

Believe it or not - postscript isn't device independent. Also PDF files are essentially compressed PS files - there are plenty of extensions to the format that PS doesn't support (like annotations, forms etc), but PDF files don't have to have them.

Here [tinaja.com] is the best postscript site I know. It's very old, but has tons of stuff that postscript can do that you never dreamed of. For instance, have you ever heard of "hanging punctuation" [tinaja.com] when you align the right margin of a text?

When I'm doing quick and dirty stuff I use PDF, but when I want real publication-quality material nothing but postscript will do the trick.

It's all about formatting Postscript in intended to be Exactly what they get is what you got format. PDFs will embed all the needed fonts, etc. Scale the page to fit on whatever printer, etc. So if you make a spiffy poster with 348 point Comic Sans MS some Linux guy will still see the document has you envisioned it even if theyt don't have Comic Sans installed.Secondly there are options in PDF to to make PDF forms fillable as well as calculate the totals, etc. I have a USPS bulk mailing form I had added

Just kidding, this is truly awesome. With any luck, this will improve the efficiency of document handling in the Norwegian government and help set off a domino effect. Unfortunately, I think it's likely that us poor Americans would be the last such domino to fall, given the unbelievable amount of data that would require conversion (much of it possibly by hand) and our government's overt support of big business (i.e. Microsoft).

There are lots of articles and talk about it surfacing in one government after another. And in some, it seems to get watered down to meaninglessness or removed completely (no doubt after behind-the-scenes pressure and corruption). So I have tended to ignore a lot of it. But this one might be firm. Still, having to wait an entire year, will it stick? A year from now, will it really happen there? Has the domino effect started?

ODF does have a "drawing" format i believe...Aside from that, there is really very little need to mandate standard formats for audio/images and to a slightly lesser extent video because pretty much everyone is already using standard (or if not officially standards blessed, at least open) formats for such things.

ODF does support spreadsheets, and slideshows although a series of standard images could also comprise a slideshow...

And databases, they are usually hosted on a server rather than kicked around as fi

however most companies do not let their users install or use random plugins so that "niche group" is 90% of the business world.

However, most companies in Norway do business with their government, so while they may not let users install plug-ins, they will probably install them for the users, probably as a matter of policy before the 2009 deadline. I'd argue any company that refuses to install a free plug-in so they can do business with a customer, will probably be dying soon anyway.

Posters would be stored in pdf format once they are completed. That is generally the case anyway. ooo impress does pretty much everything that powerpoint does, so I can't see a problem there. The main potential problems with Excel are going to be spreadsheets that link to external data, and macros, but generally, if they have complex spreadsheets, they are probably using the wrong tool for the job.

Although Norway itself, a relatively progressive country in IT matters (both Trolltech and Opera originated there) is fairly insigificant in the big scheme of things, this move coupled with other national governments moving in similar directions, might very well be enough to get the ball rolling. If Norwegian government IT sectors report significant savings and increased efficiency, then even more governments will likely follow. It's a fact of life that smaller countries take a good look at other small countries to compare efficiencies and practices.

A good example would be the Finnish school system, which has consistently scored very highly in the PISA educational ratings. That had a major influence on other European countries, such as Germany, which scored much lower, and Switzerland, making them look at how they could improve their own educational systems. It's the same thing with IT. You could very well see other European countries making similar decisions in the future.

The biggest hurdle will of course be Microsoft, which will do anything it can to stop acceptance of ODF and push in OOXML through the door. They will almost certainly try to get their big business partners to bully local governments into accepting OOXML in place of ODF.

In other news: Microsoft has hired a sizeable force of Blackwater interrogation specialists to kidnap key individuals and influence Norways' government decision and policy makers to change their terroristic software policies "with force if necessary." "This kind of socialist-communist software can not be tolerated in a capitalist market economy," Microsoft's Blackwater press-liaison said. Bush commented that "Norway, you're next on my Freedom and Peace list," and also noted that "Norway has oil." And that "because of it, they should well afford expensive Microsoft software" and that this kind of terrorist path can not be allowed for the Norwegians.

Umm, first, how is that a free market issue? Second, the company producing the de facto standard is a convicted monopolist who has repeatedly undermined the free market using file formats,so even if this is a free market issue, the government should be legitimately stepping in and regulating it. Third, you did read the summary and know they mandated it for use within the government, not for other companies in their country, right?

Once ODF gets some momentum, there will be a lot more tools being built. Just look at the options for PDF. The official Adobe Reader has been crap since about version 6. (Not sure if 8 is any better.) If better ODF support is needed, someone will build it.

One word: speed. Going from 5 to 6 felt like a big step backwards. It was slow to load and sluggish to work with. My experience with everything after 5 has been worse than that. There are several alternate PDF viewers available that are quicker and easier to work with. I'm sure someone will pop up to extol the virtues of Foxit or Sumatra or whatever.While we're at it, why don't you tell me about the deficiencies with OO.o.

I also suggest you check the definition of a troll. You could get flame bait at a stre

My problem with OO.o on Windows is speed. It's dog slow, and its database is still wanting. In fact, the database looks and feels incomplete. The ability to design forms and add business logic to their controls (scripting) is poorly implemented!

On Linux, all the above Windows points are valid and in addition, it's extra slow and ugly looking considering the fonts and general interface.

The applications are not snap and crispy but is that the fault of the standard or the application? With ODF, if someone creates an application that is blindly fast and light, everyone will get it. This avoids the vendor lock-in where you have issues opening up a Word '95 document today with Word '07.

It doesn't. And I don't think there is a way to turn such behaviour on.

The main thing stopping me from using ooo calc is that it doesn't support web queries. I use them to pick up stock prices off various web sites, then after a bit of processing the results (change in value of my stock holdings) get fed into an access database.

Having just tried, i found that in openoffice...Backspace deletes the contents of a cell without prompting you (you can still undo)Delete brings up a dialog allowing you to delete not just the contents but also any formatting, or to choose exactly what to remove... You can make it just remove formatting, or numbers, or text, or formulae etc... Very useful to strip numbers from a large block of cells without affecting formatting or textual content.As for web queries i don't know, tho i know quite a few peopl

It makes sense to specify a single format, and ODF is the only standard format that currently suits the purpose and is free to be implemented by anyone.There may be a minority of people using it, but i don't believe any of those people would be forced to pay extra to be able to.As for sending files back in the format you sent, what happens if they're sending something new and aren't aware what format you want?Aside from the fact that the government will need to maintain a large selection of apps to support

I agree with you, I too object to being forced to choose software for my personal computer, not just by the government but by any third party.This is why i support standard formats such as ODF, as a standard format provides the user the greatest freedom to choose their software.

While i strongly object to the government saying "Here is a binary file, we don't know the structure of the format but to read it you must buy a program for $400 (plus the os and hardware it requires if you dont have them already) to

We have been living with multiple formats for as long as there have been computers and we seem to be getting on just fine.

We are? Having to shell out hundreds of dollars for a program to properly read and write a document I'm required to read by the government is "just fine?" Having archived files that cannot be opened with any available program is "just fine?" Not being able to choose cheaper, alternative products when making purchasing decisions, solely because we are locked into one, proprietary format (probably draining billions from US businesses) is "just fine."

I hear the arguements but they make no real sense unless your sole objective is to push ODF, for whatever reason.

They are not undermining content or freedom of speech... The format is only a container.They already mandate the use of standard containers or transmission media for other types of information, you can call the government on the telephone but you can't contact them using ham radio... You can write them a letter on a piece of paper, but you can't carve them a stone tablet.

They have to standardise on one format for practical reasons, to support a wide range of formats is more expensive and more error prone. As a taxpayer, i don't want to be paying unnecessarily for the government to support multiple formats.

They should standardise on published documented standards for several reasons.They provide the widest and lowest cost access for the population who have to deal with the government, programs for reading/writing standard formats such as PDF and ODF are available for a wide range of systems and at a wide range of pricing/support structures. Meaning, you can obtain such programs for free if you want, or if your needs/budget are different you can obtain software with varying levels of commercial support. Big vendors such as IBM, Sun and Novell provide commercial applications and support for ODF if that's what you need. Because there are multiple vendors, competition pushes the prices down and quality up.

If they were to use a proprietary format, not only would they lock themselves in but also force third parties dealing with them to get themselves locked in too. By using a proprietary format the government are forced to purchase proprietary products at whatever price is set, and the end users are similarly forced. Because they need these particular programs (and anything else they might require) to deal with the government, people have no choice but to buy them. Because of this, the vendor can charge ridiculous amounts for retail copies while potentially giving the government big discounts to discourage them from migrating.

As a taxpayer, i don't want the government to waste money dealing with multiple formats.As a taxpayer, i want them purchasing their software in a competitive marketplace so that they get the best deal.As an end user, i want the same ability to go for the best deal rather than being forced down a particular route.As a taxpayer, most important of all i want a government that does the best for ITS PEOPLE... I want a government that fights for the best deal, I want a government that buys from local suppliers whenever possible (paying more to a local supplier than to a foreign one is often a better deal, since a big chunk of that money will come back as tax), I want a government that doesn't force unnecessary expenses on it's people - especially expenses that cause money to leave the country.

Any government that forces all of it's taxpayers to spend $450 on a foreign product is acting irresponsibly, that's a huge amount of money leaving the country.

The rest of your post is very true, but this bit is flawed. In general it is far more efficient and economical to have a mutual ( and with a focus on mutual ) agreement of free tradebetween countries. There are plenty of reasons for this,ranging from being able to take advantage of economiesof scale to local factors affecting the efficiency of your production. Money spentonoverpriced goods doesnot simply "get back into the market" because

The problem with this efficiency is that your determination of efficiency is the investment centric return on the dollar

No it's not, economic efficiency is defined by the production possibility frontier and is independent upon what current you use to measure value ( here, have a look http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_possibility_frontier [wikipedia.org] ). The efficiency gains of free trade are very real and down to physical limits of production. Simple example, hilly mountanous country close to the sea borders a fla